Promoting and exploring the accessibility of math

September 25, 2014

We believe that more people would care about math accessibility if they were made aware of the current situation, available technology, and regulations. Since we have a much larger audience on our Design Science News blog, it makes sense for us to share our accessible math news and posts there. We've also made improvements to our Design Science News blog, especially for mobile and tablet devices.

October 09, 2013

Over on our News blog we just posted Microsoft cripples the display of math in IE10 & 11. The post explains issues with IE that prevent MathPlayer from rendering MathML. This will have a major impact on people with disabilities from dyslexia to blindness trying to access math on the web.

August 06, 2013

Wikipedia is a leading source of information for students and
professionals, but the math in Wikipedia has been off limits to those
who rely on screen readers. With MathJax and MathPlayer,
that's no longer true: you can hear the math and see it highlighted as
it is spoken. MathPlayer's ability to generate speech in 15 languages
means that accessible math isn't confined to just the English pages. If
you use Wikipedia in one of the other 14 language supported by
MathPlayer, those pages are accessible too! Here are counts of the
number of pages containing accessible math for some of the languages
supported by MathPlayer:

July 24, 2013

In Monty Python's "Life of Brian", Brain stands before a crowd of
followers who repeat everything he says. He tells them they are all
individuals and the crowd responds in unison "We are all individuals".
Sadly, when people think about math accessibility, they forget that
everyone has different needs and assume some static text is good
accessibility. MathPlayer 3 changes all of that because it was built
with the idea that we are all individuals and our math accessibility
needs are different.

MathPlayer 3's speech is controlled by
thousands of rules. These rules look at user and author preferences to
generate the speech or braille the user experiences. To allow users to
set preferences, MathPlayer 3 includes a Windows control panel dialog.
The control panel currently allows you to specify your impairment, the
language used, the "speech style", how terse or verbose the speech is,
what the subject matter is, and what braille math code is desired.
Here's what the control panel looks like:

As
an example of why it is important to generate different speech for
different people, someone who is blind needs to know when a fraction
begins or ends. If you choose the "Blindness" option in the control
panel, MathPlayer might say "fraction x plus 1 over x end fraction plus
2". For someone who can see the screen but needs the verbal
reinforcement of speech, choosing the "Learning disabilities" option
would change the speech to "x plus 1 over x [pause] plus 2".

Another
example involves the amount of speech. If you are new to the concept of
square roots, you probably want to hear something like "3 times the
square root of 2". But if you are very familiar with them and have many
expressions that involve this phrase, you are probably much happier
hearing just "3 root 2".

If you haven't already done so, download MathPlayer
and listen to the differences yourself. We realize these options don't
begin to address all of the options that people may want to set. Future
versions will likely have more settings. We welcome your feedback on
what you would like to see improved; either add a comment below or email us your suggestions.

July 16, 2013

The recent release of MathPlayer 3 introduced great advances in math-to-speech technology. Now the words used for different math notations are much more natural than those used by previous versions of MathPlayer. In addition, the words and phrases used can be tailored to a user's needs. (I'll talk about customization of speech in a later blog post.)

The speech generation used in MathPlayer 3 is built on a
pattern matching language. Using the rule language, specialized speech
rules can be written that produce natural-sounding speech. For example,
f(x) might be spoken by a simplistic math-to-speech system as "f open
parenthesis x close parenthesis", but most teachers and students would
speak it as "f of x". The latter is much more understandable, and
MathPlayer is able to generate that naturally spoken math. Similarly,
simple math-to-speech systems might speak the mixed fraction 1 2/3 as
"one start fraction two over three end fraction", but most teachers,
students, and MathPlayer 3 would speak it as "one and two thirds". A
final example of specialized rules involves units such as feet and
meters. Expressions such as 3 m/s are spoken as "three meters per
second", not the simplistic and less comprehensible "3 start fraction m
over s end fraction".

MathPlayer has thousands of specialized
speech rules to make the math sound more natural. These rules were not
developed in a vacuum, and I want to take the time in this post to thank
our grant partner ETS (in particular Beth Brownstein and Lois Frankel)
and the high school summer interns from the Portland Saturday Academy
(Jeffrey Zhang, Brian Eisner, Benjamin Lin) who helped develop and
write the speech rules. Since I'm mentioning Saturday Academy interns, I
also want to include Dana Li who wrote the first two MathPlayer
translations (Spanish and Chinese) and who had to do a lot of rewriting
as we figured out how to structure rules to make translations easier.
Lastly I want to thank the hundreds of people who patiently listened to
me present speech options to them and tried very hard to seem
interested.

One
of the really exciting features of MathPlayer 3 is that the speech
includes 15 languages: Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish,
French, German, Greek, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Norwegian, Spanish
and Swedish! For the most part, these translations were done by volunteers
who stepped forward to help make math accessible in their language. I'm
sure the teachers, students and their families who now have access to
mathematical expressions in those languages will be very grateful for
your work!

I learned a lot while working with these great volunteers. For
example, in Japan and China, people speak fractions as 'b under a'
which is the opposite order from that used in English and other Western
languages ('a over b'). I learned another interesting language fact from
the Czech volunteer. MathPlayer contains rules to speak the singular
and plural forms of numbers (e.g, "one fifth" and "three fifths"), but in Czech, there are two forms for plural. One
form is for the numbers 2-4 and another form is for numbers greater
than four. MathPlayer's flexible rule system meant that we could add in
those differences so that the phrases used in each language are
tailored to that language.

Although MathPlayer supports 15
languages, there are many, many more languages out there for which we
don't have a translation. If you or someone you know would like to make
math accessibility in one of the unsupported languages a reality, please
send us email at support@dessci.com. Fame, but not fortune awaits you...